Get Your Joy Back by Laurie Wallin {Review}

I received a free copy of Get Your Joy Back from Laurie Wallin and Litfuse Publicity Group as part of the book’s launch team and the Litfuse blog tour. All opinions are my own. I was not required to write a review, much less a positive one.

*This is a re-post with added information for the Litfuse blog tour.

Get Your Joy Back by Laurie Wallin

Get Your Joy Back: Banishing Resentment and Reclaiming Confidence in Your Special Needs Family by Laurie Wallin is the first nonfiction book I have ever read in one day. When I started it, I couldn’t put it down. Laurie shares practical wisdom and hope for special needs families like she’s sitting across from you in a coffee shop, a combination of life coach and best friend. As I read her tips for dealing with the negative situations that come with being the parent of a child with special needs, I could feel tension and stress I didn’t realize was there easing out of my neck and shoulders. I will return to this book again and again to help me learn to live a better life, one of forgiveness, grace, and joy.

Laurie admits to the negative feelings special needs parents have—about our spouses, our children, and ourselves—and she does it in a way that is refreshing and brings great relief to the reader. We are not alone in our struggles, in our emotional state, and in our desire to do more than survive this life. With a sense of humor and wisdom borne of experience, Laurie offers us a different way, one of forgiveness that will allow us to live a life of joy and thrive despite our circumstances.

Get Your Joy Back has restored my hope that things can be different—better. While the path toward restoration through forgiveness isn’t easy, it is doable.

About the book:

An invitation and a promise for weary Christian parents of special needs kids from a parent who’s been there.

It isn’t the long day of monitoring a child’s precarious health or being hypervigilant about her mood and mental health challenges that weighs parents down; it’s the wishing that things were different. . . . Resentment, not the intense care they must provide their child, is the parents’ greatest stressor and source of pain.” —Laurie WallinParents of specials needs children are exhausted. They’ve done all the research, consulted all the experts, joined support groups, gotten counseling, fought for the best life for their children. Often just caring for their children’s needs and attempting to maintain a home maxes out parents’ mental, emotional, and spiritual reserves.

Laurie Wallin knows firsthand the difficulties of this journey. With Get Your Joy Back, she steps forward to make a bold, audacious claim: in the midst of this long-term, intense task, it is still possible to have an abundant life, full of joy. The key to radically changing daily life and restoring joy to the weary is forgiveness. Wallin gives parents a lifeline to find that restoration, pulling them back to shore when they feel like they’re drowning.

This book is full of practical, biblical insights and strategies to shed the resentments that leave Christian special-needs parents themselves spiritually, emotionally, and socially drained. Wallin meets readers right where they are, sugar coating nothing, but addressing issues with honesty, humor, and—above all—hope.

Laurie Wallin strives every day to live out her message for families: that no matter the challenge, in Jesus they can have joy and confidence. She is mom to four girls, two of them with mental and developmental special needs. She has been a certified life coach for over a decade, and is a regular speaker at women’s events and retreats, a popular blogger, and the author of Why Your Weirdness Is Wonderful.